The Breitling Watch Source Forums

So, i bought my TOC Unitime second hand but it has a stamped warranty card. The watch was purchased originally in 2013. I have had the watch for 2.5 months.

For the first month or so, i checked the watch's time against an atomic clock app and the watch tended run about 0-1sec fast most days (wear all day, sit in a shelf all night). I was ecstatic because this matched even my quartz watches. Then one day when I was particularly active it gained 3 seconds over the course of the day (worked out to about 6sec/24hr rate) still withing cosc so I chalked it up to the extra movement and being outside in the cold. Since then, the time keeping had been less consistent but still within COSC (or close to it at least). At first it would gain or lose time based on the position I let it sit in at night and would vary while I wore it. After a while it settled down to losing time at a rate of 4-6sec/24hr when sitting on the shelf with little regard to position, but would gain at a rate of 1-3sec/hr on my wrist. However in the last week or so, it is still +\- 3sec/24hr on my wrist, but loses time at a rate of 10-16sec/24hr (rate dependent on position) when sitting on the shelf.

What could be causing this? Is there something I can do, or does it need to go back to Breitling? Also, am I correct in assuming that given the info in the first paragraph, that the warranty is still good?

Warranty is still good.

First thing that you need to do is stop timing it so regularly, mechanical watches will vary and the average over a period of time is what's important, not snapshots over a few hours. There could be any number of reasons why the watch is losing while sitting - reserve, temperature, humidity, etc, etc, etc. If the watch maintains COSC specs over a reasonable period - several days to a week then there are no issues, if not, and it is consistent, get it regulated. It only needs to be inspected for a potential issue if it is consistently outside of COSC specs and is behaving erratically.

Cool thanks. ill set it to my app today, give it a week, and get a good average. In all reality, it is not vital that it be perfect. Though I fly for a living, and do fly the watch, the aircraft has a GPS synced clock, I really just use the chronograph in flight. I can be a bit of a nerd some times with mechanical stuff... There has been a significan change in weather conditions and such over that time frame due to seasonal changes and whatnot, so I guess I should expect the watch to vary accordingly. This is my first mechanical so I am definitely still learning.

So, I am still working on my week to average out the timing, but I have been taking some notes along the way and have found something interesting.

For the first 60hrs I was losing time at an average rate of 20-25sec/24hrs while sitting, and +/-4sec/24hrs while being worn. Pretty consistent with my pervious observations for an avg of -17.5sec/24hrs for the first 60hrs. Then in the late evening on the 3rd day I was playing around with the timezone function and realized that if I went forward a few hours into the next day, then came back, the hour hand and world time disc would be about 30mins out of alignment, and the date window would be out of alignment, while the minute hand was fine. I then went back a few timezones and then forward to my local time and everything lined up perfectly. I shrugged this off and went to bed. In the morning when I checked it (12hrs later) it had only lost 2 seconds (4sec/24hrs, within spec). I checked again later that evening and the next morning (33hrs total) it had not lost or gained any time at all for an average of -1.45sec/24hrs for hrs 61-93. I don't know if the timezone bit had anything to do with it or not, but I find this development interesting. At the end of my 1 week experiment I am going to calculate 3 averages, before messing with the timezone, after, and overall for the week and make my final decision based on that data.

That bit you describe about the date window out of alignment when you go back a day is perfectly normal. In fact it is described in the manual (I don't have it handy just at the moment). From what I remember if you need to go back a day you need to go back at least 6 or 7 hours into the previous day and then advance it forward to the hour that you want.

Must have missed that. Thanks! This is my firts mechanical watch so i am still learning

So I cut the test short a day due to a scheduling issue. Here are the results:

Total of 5.99 days. Total time loss of 35 seconds, for an average of -5.84sec/day. Just barely out of COSC.

However for the 2.48 days before the messing with the time zone function It lost 34 sec for an average of -13.71sec/day. Way out of COSC

In the 3.5 days after, it lost 1 sec total for an average -0.29sec/day comfortably inside COSC and better than all but my radio controlled Casio.

Conclusions:
In all likelihood, the issue was probably tied to the time zone function in some manor. Either it was slightly out of wack from a previous adjustment, or something, but apparently the messing with the time zone function cleared it up and it is working really well now. So while i will keep an eye on it, I am satisfied for now that it is in proper working order

**for those following the numbers, the missing 0.01 of a day is due to rounding.